I’m sure we’ve all done it.  We go from one room of our home to another, intent on getting something, only to arrive and wonder, “What am I doing here?” Or we’re introduced to someone and seconds later, “What was her name?” Not to worry; short-term memory is less than 30 seconds, which means the next time you need something from another room, run!

Human memory is complex but fascinating and absolutely essential to our personal identity and to daily living.  There is much that is involved in the memory process.  For instance, it really is a process, constructed over a lifetime.  Memory is also selective.  Since no one can nor are we meant to remember everything, we have the unconscious ability to sift through the hundreds of stimuli we encounter daily and select what we will file in our memory banks (although those files might not always be retrievable when we want them).  Whether we remember something depends on how attentive we are in the first place, how motivated we are to remember it, and whether we are emotionally invested at the time (negatively or positively).  What helps to improve memory?  Rehearsal – repeating whatever it is to ourselves or telling the story to others.  And it doesn’t hurt to have memory partners – people in our lives who can jump start our memories and even add to them.

Given the critical role of memory in living, it is not surprising that God has and does and will always work in and through ordinary human memory – knowing full well that we can be ever so forgetful.  Thankfully, the remembering that is central to our Judeo-Christian tradition and to our faith is not dependent on human memory as much as on God’s memory – God’s remembering of the promises made, God’s faithfulness to the covenant relationship.

The passage from Isaiah that we heard lends insight into the centrality of memory to Israel, God’s Chosen People, and God’s ongoing engagement with them in and through remembering.  Memory was key to Israel’s identity as a people – a people who were heirs to the promises God made to Abraham, that is, that Israel would be vindicated and freed from the injustices, the oppression, and enslavement which were part of their experience and that they would become the nation among nations, the epicenter of peace and justice before the world.  The covenant story was the story they held in common and a story that they remembered from one generation to the next.  It was a story that was retold and rehearsed through their prayer and ritual practices, through the words of prophets who reminded them of God’s covenant, and through their lived reality as a community of memory. Importantly, Israel’s remembering of what God promised was not simply recalling the past; rather, remembering was key to making sense of all that had been, all that was, and all that might yet be – past, present and future.

This was especially important during the times of Israel’s suffering whether at the hands of the politically powerful and social elite, or as a consequence of Israel’s own sinfulness, their own forgetting the ways of God, their failure to be faithful to the covenant. Part of Israel’s story is crying out to God during these times, “God, did you forget us?  Have you forgotten your promises?” Israel pleads with God to forget the sins of the people and to remember the covenant.  And it was because of Israel’s memory that their hope was sustained.

So what’s going on in what we heard from Isaiah:  Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians; the Jewish people were decimated, the survivers humiliated.  Hope came to the people when the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylon and within a year allowed the Jewish people living in exile to return home.  The Jews thought Cyrus might be the messiah, so the song from Isaiah is one of praise and rehearses Israel in remembering that God never forgets the promises made:  “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb?  Even should she forget, I will never forget you.”  It’s a wonderful expression of the intimacy of the relationship each of us has with God.  Like a mother and even more so, God will never forget us, for we have been conceived in the very heart of God – the One who knew us before we were born and who calls us to become more and more the people God knows us to be.

Memory is no less important to us Christians today as it was – and is – to our Jewish ancestors in faith.  Christian memory is likewise how we experience God’s engagement with us.  Remembering all that God has done, is doing, and will do for us through Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit is a dynamic process – it is action, not just some intellectual function.  It’s a specific remembrance of God who acts in and through human lives, in the present as in the past – what God has done in particular times and places for people of all places and all times.  It’s the kind of remembrance that is a constant turning to the Triune God, the source of all being.

So like Israel, memory is key to our identity.  We are a community of memory, one that does not – that cannot – forget its past, nor its present, nor its future.  Also like Israel, we can be forgetful – turning away from or forgetting to respond to God’s invitation to live in right relationship with God.  We do better with remembering when we rehearse – and we do this, for example, each time we gather for liturgy.  Liturgy is a rehearsal room – where our attitudes our shaped, where our memory of all that God has done and is doing is sharpened.  We also rehearse our remembering in the lives that we lead – in our actions and words, our reaching out to those in need, our working for right and just relationships in this world, our striving for peace, and on and on.  We become epiphanies – manifestations – of our remembering.  We need to be a community of memory for the sake of the world.

And how blessed we are to be a community of memory – built in are many memory partners!  We have one another in the Christian community to remind us to be attentive to the Spirit moving in our lives.  We have one another to jump start our memory when we forget God’s ways.  We have one another to increase our desire to remember – to desire relationship with God more deeply.

Our God never forgets us.  Our God is a God of promises fulfilled.  And don’t forget it!